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Video: Challenges of Digital Ad Insertion for Live Broadcasts

Learn more about ad insertion for live events at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete video of this presentation from Streaming Media West, LS101: Monetizing Live Streams, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Ad Insertion: Live vs. VOD

Jeff Harper: Thinking about digital ad insertion, it's one of the main complications of live streaming vs. VOD in that you have a live window, and being able to line up your DSPs, basically, your ads, typically they like to see your inventory over a long period of time, get a sense of who your viewers are, what your audience is like, what kind of numbers you have. You don't have that luxury in a live event. Typically, you have this very narrow window. Your inventory comes online all at once,. and all of a sudden there's all this supply essentially and then it goes away.

What we've discovered is we're having to line up the ad inventory ahead of time and let our DSPs know this is what's coming. This is the audience. This is what it's going to look like so that our audience doesn't show up and then the advertisers are giving us penny CPMs. It's been one of the big challenges that we've had to face with a live event.

Diversifying CDN Distributions

Steven Tripsas: That's a good point too. And this doesn't apply just to ads. That applies to the delivery. That goes back to the McGregor fight, because we need to diversify as an industry on our CDN distributions. We can't just rely on one. I know we all get good rates on one, but understanding the complexities of distribution between CDNs, maybe even having a backup of your own that you could stitch together with a few Cloud providers. You need to be dynamic in that delivery space. And in general, when they all come a-running, it could be a bunch of providers all coming running at once, and that's your single point of failure even though it's massively distributed.

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